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Five lessons I learned from paying back $35K in two years

November 7, 2019

Five lessons I learned from two years of paying back debt

Paying back debt isn’t fun.

Sending a big chunk of your hard earned cash toward debt every time you get paid…well, it sucks. It really is that simple.

I feel qualified to make that assessment, too: after all, over the last two years, we have sent about $35K toward reducing our debt — and we’ve still got $30K to go.

It’s certainly been a journey — and as is the case with most journeys, we have learned a lot of lessons along the way.

Two years in with at least a couple more to go, here’s a look at some of those lessons.

Year in Review: We paid back $17K in 2018.

December 18, 2018

Debt Payoff 2018

We paid back $17K in 2018.

Honestly, I wouldn’t believed that if I hadn’t done the math myself (twice, just to be sure).

In fact, if you told me at the start of 2018 that we would finish out the year with only the student loan outstanding, I would have laughed. While reaching this point was the goal, I knew it was probably an unrealistic one. I would have been content with any progress.

The fact that we pulled it off…well, it’s the icing on the cake.

With 2018 coming to a close, I wanted to spend a little bit of time reflecting this week. And since this is a personal finance blog, it felt appropriate to start with a little look back on our finances.

So let’s have a look.

The credit line is paid off! What now? The $47.5K student loan

November 15, 2018

How we paid back $8.3K of debt in 7 months

Today is a special day.

Today, we paid off our credit line.

Finally.

Some background information, for those who may be new here: we took out this credit line in May 2013 to buy our first car. It has carried a balance ever since.

Over the years, we made occasional payments, but we didn’t start making any meaningful progress paying it back until April 2018. Over the last seven months, paying this off has been our top financial priority. Needless to say, I have never been so excited to transfer $391 from our chequing account in my entire life.

I don’t even want to think about how much interest we have paid on this loan.

What does this mean? Closing in on the one year anniversary of our debt-free journey, we have paid off two credit cards, our car, and now, our credit line.

One year later, we only have one debt left to go: the student loan.

It’s our biggest debt by far.

It’s also the one with the most ambitious pay-off goal.

The simple strategy we’re using to crush our debt

May 10, 2018

Snowball Method : the easiest way to crush debt quickly

April was a great month for us in terms of paying off debt.

We wiped out our car loan 14 months ahead of schedule (more details here). Watching that balance shrink was thrilling and seeing it finally reach zero felt like Christmas morning. That’s how exciting it was for me.

But the excitement did not last long. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of what we accomplished but the hard work is not finished.-

We still have an $8K credit line to pay back. And then there’s the $50k student loan to face.

It would be easy to get discouraged looking at what’s ahead. Sometimes I see those numbers and wonder if we’ll ever be able to pay it all off.

The discouraged feeling doesn’t last long, though. That’s because we have found a strategy that has made paying off debt easy: the snowball method.

Three things we did to pay off our car loan early

May 8, 2018

Car loan : why (and how) we paid it off 14 months early

We paid off our car loan last month.

This isn’t a big deal on its own — people pay off car loans all the time. What’s significant is that we made our final payment 14 months early.

We paid off our five-year car loan in less than four years.

And while we made sacrifices to do it, it was not nearly as difficult as I anticipated it would be.

Here are the three steps we took to shave 14 months off our car loan.